New World of Marketing, or Not?

With the tagline “A New World of Marketing is Here,” Next Jump, an e-commerce marketplace founded by Charlie Kim back in 1994 has been working under the surface, underneath corporate intranets or retailer’s rewards websites, and expanding itself to reach a wider audience. “More than 100 million Americans have access to Next Jump’s e-commerce marketplace, and 10 million a year are customers” (Privacy Lives). It has become such a powerful advertising medium that “today, 60 percent of the Fortune 500 companies use Next Jump’s technology for their employee discount programs” (NYTimes). While the company continues to develop, Next Jump has been quietly gathering years of data from companies and customers, including personal details for demographic purposes; and even credit card transactions from American Express and MasterCard. Based on this information, each person’s characteristics and interests would be analyzed by Next Jump, enabling the company to tailor advertisements and offers that would spark the customer’s interest, often through emails. This microtargeting strategy employed by Next Jump has been proven to be so effective that, “for every 11 people who see of its ads, one person makes a purchase” (NYTimes).

The Internet has become a powerful tool for personalized advertising, one that has been effective in luring customers to buy products. However, is it fair to the customers that companies like Next Jump have been using the vast amount of customers’ information that they possesses to their advantage?

Paradox of Personalized Search

Last Friday, Google announced yet another change they’ve made to the search engine- Personalized Search. The idea of this new feature is to enable users to obtain the most relevant search results based on their search history. For example, if I look up “NYU,” www.home.nyu.edu would appear at the top of my list because I click on it so frequently. This is done through an anonymous cookie that is linked to one’s browser to ensure maximum relevance and precision. This feature was previously offered to users that are signed into their Google account, but the company has decided to extend this luxury to signed-out users, in more than forty different languages.

However, Personalized Search has received criticisms from many- mainly about how Google is probing into people’s privacy by going through users’ search activities, and collecting their data. Before this, users had the option of retaining their privacy by not logging into their Google account while browsing the web, but now, Google can track down every single user, whether or not they are signed in.

Personalized Search- is it bringing search engines to a whole new level with results tailored to suit the queries of users? Or are users losing their trust in the internet, having to limit their online activity to protect their privacy? Is the internet acting as a bridge to connect people with the infinite realm of the cyber world, or is it in fact limiting their agency to explore?